Merging exFAT Support For Linux Is Being Talked About - Waiting On Microsoft's Blessing

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Merging exFAT Support For Linux Is Being Talked About - Waiting On Microsoft's Blessing

Microsoft's exFAT file-system is more than one decade old and while there has been out-of-tree efforts, the mainline Linux kernel as of yet does not support the file-system even with it appearing on more SD cards and other devices. But there is now a renewed effort to get an exFAT driver into the Linux kernel...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-exFAT-2019-Discussion

[birdie]

Just to note: Samsung didn't open source the exFat Linux driver - they leaked it.

I still wonder: reverse engineering exFat is an order of magnitude easier than e.g. doing that for NTFS. Why no one has done that yet? AFAIK/IANAL the US has the laws which allow that if your goal is interoperability.

[AsuMagic]

Just to note: Samsung didn't open source the exFat Linux driver - they leaked it.

I still wonder: reverse engineering exFat is an order of magnitude easier than e.g. doing that for NTFS. Why no one has done that yet? AFAIK/IANAL the US has the laws which allow that if your goal is interoperability.

Because exFAT is much less used? NTFS is used by every Windows user, most systems will never ever see a exFAT storage device.

[edwaleni]

Because exFAT is much less used? NTFS is used by every Windows user, most systems will never ever see a exFAT storage device.

Correct me if I am wrong, but don't the DSLR companies and many prosumer video camera companies license exFAT for writing to flash media?

Unless they plug the camera in every time, many may pull the media out to transload.

[phoenix_rizzen]

exFAT is a requirement of the SDXC standard, or something along those lines. SD cards over a certain size are supposed to ship formatted with an exFAT filesystem.

https://www.sdcard.org/developers/overview/capacity/index.html

[birdie]

Because exFAT is much less used? NTFS is used by every Windows user, most systems will never ever see a exFAT storage device.

Most (if I'm not mistaken) modern SD cards/USB sticks are formatted using exFAT.

[geearf]

Because exFAT is much less used? NTFS is used by every Windows user, most systems will never ever see a exFAT storage device.

Aren't a lot of Android devices using exFat for the SD card ?

[Venemo]

I still wonder: reverse engineering exFat is an order of magnitude easier than e.g. doing that for NTFS. Why no one has done that yet? AFAIK/IANAL the US has the laws which allow that if your goal is interoperability.

It has been done. You can install it, it's called fuse-exfat, it's just not inside the kernel, but a user-space implementation.

[andrei_me]

Well thought about the patents being released after joining OIN, hoping that "blessing" moves along.

[discordian]

Just to note: Samsung didn't open source the exFat Linux driver - they leaked it.

I still wonder: reverse engineering exFat is an order of magnitude easier than e.g. doing that for NTFS. Why no one has done that yet? AFAIK/IANAL the US has the laws which allow that if your goal is interoperability.

Samsung open-sourced the leaked code afterwards. The issue are patents, which are not affected whether you reverse engineered code.